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How To Scan covers & booklets
Table of contents:
Programs:
Scanning: Either you could use Microsoft's Photo Editor, which is included in Office, or e.g. excellent freeware like IrfanView.
Viewing: Maybe you want to view or read the booklet on your PC monitor screen, during you are listening an album via your unbeatable PC Audio music jukebox. Any program, which can show jpg, will do. E.g. the built in Windows-out-of-the-box tool 'Windows picture & fax viewer' will do fine, e.g. showing all pictures in album directory as dia-show.
Select a high resolution between 300 to 600 dpi. I recommend 300 dpi, not more, and not less.
Select 24 bit colour depth.
Take care, that you don't exceed 32 MB size of the intermediate bitmap. Unfortunately some crappy software or scanners are limited to max. 32 MB size. But this depends on your system, you can try yourself, if you can exceed 32 MB. On the other side, it does not make sense to scan pictures bigger than 32 MB for your goal of archiving your booklet. And it doesn't make much sense to scan with higher resolution than 300 dpi, as the resulting picture will be way bigger than the original. Already a 300 dpi scan looks way bigger than the source in real life.
If you have small black text on white background, it is often helpful, to play with contrast, brightness and especially the gamma setting. First try out Automatic adjustment of Gamma value, contrast & brightness. If you are not satisfied with the result, use undo function or/and try out Gamma setting first, mostly this helps already and you are finished. You get better results, if you carry out Auto Adjust & gamma setting changes before size reduction !
Coloured pictures can be improved, too, if you Auto Adjust or adjust Gamma values manually with sliders.
To fit your scan to your screen for viewing and to save backup space, you want to reduce the original size of the scan.
300 dpi scans can be reduced to about 30% - 80% ,
E.g. 300 dpi scans should be reduced to about 70% - 100% (100% means no resizing), so that after adjusting the new reduced size picture to 100% of the new reduced size, the text, or content should be still easy readable, viewable, otherwise use "Undo" function. The archiving & scanning would be a waste, if you could read afterwards the text only with problems.
If you enable or disable smoothing during size reduction depends on the goal of the single picture.
If you have a lot texts like song texts, you do not want to smooth.
If you have a nice photo, the result will be better with enabled smoothing.
Sometimes you need to find the best compromise between size reduction, smoothing or not.
Saving the picture:
It is recommended to save the picture in a lossy format like jpeg, jpg, as it saves a lot space on your HD or backup medium. For this result, select about 80% jpg quality. This results to very good quality and reasonable space for the compressed picture.
Typical example: the bitmap scan had a size nearby 32 MB ==>> after size reduction to 25x25% and saving as 80% jpg, a size results of ca. 100 - 200 kB.
Like MPC is a lossy compression format for music, and Wavpack, FLAC would compress the music losslessly, jpg is lossy, and PNG is a Lossless format for compressing and saving, storing pictures, scans. Lossless needs more space than lossy, so decide yourself, if you want to take the space for scans in png or if you save with 80% eg. jpg and you save some space.
Example:
Following picture is an excerpt from a scan of a booklet with text & photo:
You recognize, that the text is not that sharp, but still good readable. The photo looks nice, too.
Technical scan data:
480 dpi, 24 bit, about 30 MB uncompressed.
-> gamma value set from 1.00 down to 0.75
(improves contrast, readability of text, as disadvantage the photo gets darker a bit.)
-> then size reduction to 25% x 25% with smoozing
(good for photo, but for this reason the text is not the sharpest, but easy readable, still)
-> saved as jpg with 80% quality (161 kB)
(btw., the small excerpt (as lossless *.png) of those 161 kB has a size of 236 kB, which shows the way better compression of jpg for such pictures, photos.
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